Actually, you know what, fuck it, I’ll say something about Deathly Hallows.
Readers are fuckin wild for this one in the sense that that book is probably the least interesting book in the whole series. It’s a little tiny bit interesting, though, how Rowling chose to conclude the series by taking everything that gave all of the previous books in the series an automatic structure and pacing (the school year, the school, most of the cast of characters), the stuff that I would say was surely the stuff that people latched on to and was probably instrumental to the commercial success of the series, and just fuckin’ binning it tae fuck. Of course, from my memory of it, because she was not a good writer (then or perhaps ever), it ends up just being a messy interlocking chain of Events, and even back then I am pretty sure I felt like the deaths of certain characters was more or less contrived to be shocking and memorable to The Fans, while having little to no dramatic weight or impact on the actual story. Like, come on, what kind of rube is really going to be all that broken up about the heroic sacrifice of the fuckin’ owl that was Harry’s mail carrier? And that’s in, like, what, the first few chapters of the book?
I’ll admit I’m probably applying some degree of selective memory here but I want to sound cooler than I probably was and say that even as I was reading it, I at least vaguely remember feeling that it just didn’t really impact me much at all. I read it in, like, two sittings total from what I remember, and I do remember thinking “well yeah I guess that wraps it up,” but I do also at least vaguely remember feeling at least conflicted. Was that a pivotal moment for me, on the cusp of becoming an adult, developing and exercising an adult’s critical sensibility? Maybe.
At any rate, yeah, readers were fucking off their rockers for that one, I had thought that maybe Readers had had little to no choice but to put Deathly Hallows up on there because it was the only Harry Potter book from the 21st century, but the previous two books were both also from the 21st century. Not even the fuckin’ ‘Snape Killed Dumbledore’ book? It does make me wonder how Readers got their vote split, and perhaps also how the book would change if it wasn’t a 21st Century Books list, but a 21st Century Books List Plus The Four Harry Potter Books From The 20th Century Too Because We Know You Haven’t Read Any Other Books Despite Being A Grown Adult list.
